Two infrastructure captains taking different paths

E Sreedharan (88) and PS Nair (73) — the men from Kerala who helped create two of Delhi’s world-class showpieces, the metro rail network and the T3 terminal at the Indira Gandhi International Airport — have chosen diverse paths after decades of deep involvement with infrastructure.While Sreedharan is learning the ropes in electoral politics in Kerala, Nair politely declined a request from a political party several years ago.“I had never been interested in politics,” said Nair, a former CEO of GMR Airports, who is currently engaged in building skills in India’s airport sector.Living in Bengaluru, Nair said: “Earlier, we used to send our employees abroad for training. But today, we have built in-house capability and are, in fact, getting requests from the Middle East and Africa to train their workers.”Sreedharan worked and hung up boots in the public sector, while Nair switched to the private sector in 2005 after long years of association with the Airports Authority of India (AAI). The two men have left their deep footprints on Delhi’s infrastructure landscape just like two other personalities from Kerala did in totally different fields: Verghese Kurien in the dairy sector in Gujarat and TN Seshan as the chief election commissioner.Both Sreedharan and Nair proved Indians have their own expertise to build state-of-the-art public infrastructure. Until T3 was commissioned, Nair was also in touch with Sreedharan occasionally exchanging notes on the project progress.Sreedharan told ET recently that he was joining politics to demonstrate it is possible to cut execution time of public infrastructure projects if voted to power. Nair, meanwhile, is involved in developing tomorrow’s professionals. A native of Kozhikode in Kerala, Nair is engaged on the boards of the GMR Group companies in the airports sector. The union government has also roped him in as one of its nominees on the board of the National Skill Development Council for Defence and Aerospace, to drive its ambitious skills-building programme. The GMR Aviation Academy, which trains professionals for a global market, is his baby.

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